Wednesday August 31, 2016

From diagnosing certain mental disorders to optimizing the placement of images in textbooks, eye tracking is useful across a variety of fields: psychology, medicine, advertising, marketing and more. Scientists and researchers can learn a lot from understanding where people look and why. But making eye tracking easy and ubiquitous has been hard. Deep learning and NVIDIA GPUs are changing that.

Given its potential, it’s nagged researchers that getting one’s eyes tracked wasn’t easier. "It was quite shocking to me that we all don’t have eye-trackers," says Aditya Khosla, a graduate student in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory of MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department. Khosla and a team of six other researchers from the University of Georgia and the Max Planck Institute of Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany, set out to achieve a straightforward goal: create eye-tracking software that could run on any mobile phone with a camera.